Rail 3.1 CI setup with Jenkins, Test Unit & SimpleCov on OS X Lion.

I recently had to setup a build server for some rails work I’m doing. Still wanting to support my other projects I setup Jenkins. I ran into several issues.

Running Jenkins as a hidden user

First I noticed that jenkins was running as the “daemon” user, this obviously wasn’t going to work for github and rvm needs. So I did some googling and had some guides to get Jenkins running as a specific user. I did the following (sourced from http://colonelpanic.net/2011/06/jenkins-on-mac-os-x-git-w-ssh-public-key/ ).

sudo dscl . create /Users/jenkins
sudo dscl . create /Users/jenkins PrimaryGroupID 1
sudo dscl . create /Users/jenkins UniqueID 300
sudo dscl . create /Users/jenkins UserShell /bin/bash
sudo dscl . passwd /Users/jenkins $PASSWORD
sudo dscl . create /Users/jenkins home /Users/Shared/Jenkins/Home/

Note: That’s really $PASSWORD up above. This gives you a prompt to enter that password. Next you’ll need to stop the Jenkins service and edit the plist and start the service back up.

sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.jenkins-ci.plist
sudo vim /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.jenkins-ci.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.jenkins-ci.plist

You’re plist file should end up like this.

RVM issues

Now my next issue was despite what I’d read elsewhere I was unable to get Jenkins to use the default ruby provided by RVM. So I just pasted the commands that I would run anyway in the “Execute Shell” build step.

Getting Jenkins to see tests

I’ve been using Test:Unit/Minitest lately just to keep more consistent with my day to day work. However I haven’t found a way to get my tests to show when using the “Execute Shell” task. I found a little gem called ci_reporter that exports to the standard junit format, unfortunately it doesn’t work with minitest yet. That’s ok I haven’t done anything that Test:Unit doesn’t support so far so I added the the following to my Gemfile (note the part about unit-test 2.0):

group :development, :test do
  gem 'ci_reporter', '1.6.3'
  gem 'test-unit', '~> 2.0.0'
  # Pretty printed test output
  gem 'turn', :require => false
end

Running “rake ci:setup:testunit test” should give you a bunch of xml files in tests/reports. Now we need to tell Jenkins where to find those reports so add a post build action to pick them up as junit reports.

Rcov reports

This was pretty easy.

1. Install Jenkins plugin for RCov (it’s in the plugin list in the admin section).
2. add simplecov and semiplecov-rcov to your Gemfile.
3. add the following 4 lines to the TOP of your tests/test_helper.rb file:

require 'simplecov'
require 'simplecov-rcov'
SimpleCov.formatter = SimpleCov::Formatter::RcovFormatter
SimpleCov.start 'rails'

In closing

This took a fair amount of time, but the end result was quite satisfying. I now have CI with tests, tests coverage, RVM to target different versions of Ruby and bundler to make sure my Gem environment is sane.